I'm going to try and remember to bring my camera with me wherever I go in future. There's a lot I always want to photograph which I can't because I've forgotten to bring it. Today there have been two things I really wanted to capture but couldn't, here's my day.
I left this morning at just after 11:00 to walk to the city centre. It's about an hour and a half walk but I wanted to stop at the Uni for five minutes to leech off of their wifi. The only important email I got was one telling me that I couldn't take on extra shifts on Monday, which means I have another two down days before I'm back at work, which is rather annoying. But I'm a trainee so I wasn't actually expecting them to approve this.
Whilst I was looking through my Facebook and emails however, I heard a light *thunk*. I looked up and saw a crow, flapping its wings frantically, trying to pull a bag from a bin near the bottom of the university. After a couple minutes I watched it successfully pull the thing out and begin rummaging. Eventually another crow showed up and then a third. I know it sounds odd, being intrigued by these crows rooting through bin bags for scraps of food. But the way they interacted was so interesting. A dominant crow picking at the food, one submissive crow trying to get scraps around the edge, and a challenger crow attempting to steal the food from the dominant one. Eventually the dominant one lost and after twenty minutes they'd picked out all the food and left nothing but a mess across the path. But it made me wonder how many of the messes we go past are due to stuff like this rather than humans dumping their waste. And how even with bins and our attempts to control nature, she's still dominant.
Walking down the canal I thought about what it meant to be civilised and whether humans were a civilised species and, more importantly, whether there even was such a thing as civilised. We marvel our own destructive capabilities and how only we have the intelligence to make sure machines, but I would counter that guns may be complicated, but not making them would be the intelligent choice. Can we continue to make arms and still call ourselves a civilised species.
Eventually I got to Birmingham Library, where I found the second thing I wanted to photograph. When searching around the 4th floor, I found a small hidden staircase. Go up it to floor 7 and you find the secret garden, now one of my favourite parts of Birmingham. From the garden you can see for miles, all the buildings, vehicles, and people below look like figurines. The thing I found most interesting was the floor though, there's a pattern of bricks on the floor outside the library. I've never noticed it before because I've never been high enough to, but when you are, you notice that all the zigzag bricks make up an intricate mural, and it looks amazing. But from the ground you just can't see the thing. It reminds me of something my mum told me when I was young. I don't remember when but we were looking at a painting, and I was getting too close. And I asked her why it was so boring, and she pulled me back by the shoulder and said, sometimes you have to take a step back to really appreciate what's in front of you.
Annoyingly, this was one of those times when she's right. What I had to do was take a step away before I could really appreciate the beauty of the floor tiles, or the building works, or the high rises, or the people, or the buses, or the greenery of Birmingham.
That, is the second thing I wanted to photograph.
And those were my thoughts for today so far.
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